Cupertino High School sophomore Neha Shaik is “shaik-ing” up the world of climate activism with her app WildfireWatch, which was recently featured at a showcase in Washington, D.C. to represent California’s 17th District in the Congressional App Challenge.
Having seen the effect of wildfires on California, Shaik began researching technological solutions to mitigate wildfires in December 2023. She found that most of the existing machine learning predictors for wildfire spread failed to factor in social vulnerability — conditions like poverty or lack of resources that make certain areas more susceptible to disasters.
“It’s so important when creating an effective fire management plan that we take into consideration special accommodations that these communities might need,” said Shaik. “For example, evacuation alerts in their native language, if a high percentage of the population doesn’t speak English.”
Shaik’s goal for WildfireWatch is to help policymakers better allocate resources during wildfires, and allow residents to know the risk level of their community. The app uses artificial intelligence, combined with past wildfire data, to make predictions about wildfire spread. One major component is WildfireDB, which consists of over 17 million data points including weather, topography and vegetation — 23 gigabytes of data collected over seven years. To gauge social vulnerability, she used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Social Vulnerability Index regarding socioeconomic, housing and minority status from over 80,000 census tracts. She then merged the two datasets to create a combined risk prediction score, along with a map visualizing wildfire risk across the country. Throughout the process, Shaik received feedback from surveys and consultations with retired firefighters, to make her app more accurate and user-friendly.
After finishing the project in February 2024, Shaik submitted it to the Congressional App Challenge, a nationwide science competition hosted by the House of Representatives. Her project earned recognition from Representative Ro Khanna, and she was invited to present it at the #HouseOfCode showcase in Washington, D.C. The showcase, which took place April 8–9, 2025 in the U.S. Capitol Building, is a highly prestigious national science fair where participants demonstrate their apps to representatives, lawmakers and students. Out of over 12,000 applicants, only around 300 are invited to #HouseOfCode.
Currently, WildfireWatch is only able to load risk maps for a few census tracts at a time, due to limited processing power. Instantaneously generating a risk map for the entire country would require access to very large processing power, so Shaik is seeking funding to improve her app. She also plans to add a feature to show which social vulnerability factor is most critical in each region, and hopes to create more similar projects in the future.
“Seeing how this project I created could have an impact on real communities was really rewarding,” said Shaik. “It’s motivated me to continue learning, to be able to create more projects that do social good.”
